The purpose of this course is to better acquaint students with the techniques for economic evaluation of interventions or policies which have a major impact on health. Unlike the approaches such as cost benefit analysis used to inform public decisions in other areas, health evaluations rely on a set of tools that do not monetize directly all outcomes of the policy or intervention being considered. Instead, some outcomes are left in either physical units or summary utility terms, and then thresholds are set for decision making. The major issues addressed in the course will be: the rationale for economic evaluation;formulating the problem and choosing a perspective for the analysis; identifying and measuring outcomes and effectiveness; identifying, enumerating, and valuing the inputs to form an economic measure of costs; dealing with timing of costs and outcomes; reflecting various types of uncertainty
in the analysis; and reporting the results.
